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Half-Life Preview

When the question of best PC title arises many games come to mind. For me, it's Unreal Tournament, as it is the first person shooter that piques my interest beyond belief. I'm a fanatic of the game and play it online every single chance I get. To many others, a few real-time strategy titles come to mind as best PC games, games such as: Age of Empires 2, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, and Black and White. Another PC game that millions swear by is Half-Life. A game that is three years of age, but is still considered to be one of the best FPS titles on the PC. Half-Life's story and its progressive gameplay sets it apart from the redundancy we are used to seeing in today's frag-fest titles like Quake III and Unreal Tournament. That is not to say QIII and UT are bad games, I just view Half-Life as a breath of fresh air. I've noticed that little by little the FPS genre has begun to follow suit with games such as Red Faction, which has been compared directly to Half-Life in almost every single category. Aside from that, porting PC based FPS shooters to consoles has spread out with titles like Quake III and Unreal Tournament on the PS2 and Dreamcast. In light of that situation, Sierra has decided to port their most respected title --Half-Life-- on to the most respected console; the PS2

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Back in November of 1998 Half-Life was considered to be the pinnacle of PC visuals. If you had monster hardware, then by all means take advantage of it with Half-Life. Let's fast forward three years later, where videogaming technology has become more sophisticated than PC technology (well in the PS2's case at least). Ports of tremendously popular PC games have surfaced, or will soon be, left and right on our console, all of which accurately resembled their original counterparts. While the current three screens do this game little justice, we are working hard on obtaining a hands-on copy of the game. In the meantime, I'll briefly state that from the video footage of the game I saw, the game looked very fast. The frame rate seemed to be fixed at a solid 60, the texture detail didn't seem at all washed down, and the eye-candy was there as well. I doubt anybody will find disappointment in the visuals.

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Half-Life has been touted as 'the' single-player experience, and the same can be said about THQ's very own Red Faction, which was released to staggering reviews and sales numbers this past May. Half-Life stars you as Gordon Freeman, an employee at the Black Mesa Research Center's Anomalous Materials department (try saying that three times!). The organization has been attacked and swarmed by aliens, and of course the painfully obvious part is Gordon is the hero of the game who must fight his was through to declare bragging rights. The PS2 version of Half-Life will not in fact turn out to be a watered down port, aside from the visual enhancements, Gearbox has gone out of their way and implemented a co-op story mode called Decay. Those hoping to re-create the PC atmosphere will be pleased to know that Half-Life will include the support of USB based mouse and keyboard accessories. Sadly though the game is only two players, but nevertheless should turn out to be an excellent FPS shooter on the PS2. Look for it somewhere in the middle of October.